Shattered Minds Page 27

  Carina hopes no one will speak to her beyond small talk. She’s pretending to be a new starlet who’s just landed a big role, but of course neglecting to say which one and give away her identity. She’s no actress – she can, at a push, fake normalcy, but it’s never perfect. Trying to play a bright-eyed, innocent ingénue is beyond her.

  There. Kim and Aliyah have arrived, and Kivon is close behind. He met them at Santa Monica Pier without mishap, then. Like everyone, they’re wearing masks to alter their features, and they’re dressed up far more than they ever would have been at Sudice’s labs. But their height and colourings are both the same, and they don’t match anyone from the guest list when their false names pop up on her ocular implants. Clavell swoops in to greet them and leads them to a side room. A few curious heads turn to watch them go.

  A droid comes to meet Carina, and she follows it down a side hallway.

  She doesn’t enter immediately. Aliyah and Kim have been led to the Chair room where Carina operated on Dax. Raf is there, in his masked disguise, to screen them both, ensuring they don’t have the same malware in their heads. They’ll already have been scanned for trackers when they entered the hovercar that brought them here. Carina watches on her ocular implants.

  Carina sends Raf a ping, letting him know that Kivon is here and safe. He’s also brought Tam, and Clavell has hidden her in one of the many rooms of his fortress. Carina feels a little bad she’s keeping Raf from his boyfriend, and then absurdly pleased her empathy is working well enough for that.

  Kim and Aliyah hesitate. She knows they’re both thinking of other Chairs in San Francisco. Their respective subjects. How Carina’s subjects had a tendency to nearly die, and how they were meant to meet her in just a few moments. They can’t hide that flash of suspicion.

  Kim volunteers first and clambers into the Chair. Raf maps her brain within a minute, scrutinizing the implants. He doesn’t see anything unusual, but he reaches out to Carina on his implants, just in case.

  ‘She’s clear,’ Carina pings back. ‘At least as far as I can tell.’

  Raf disconnects Kim and she sits up, patting her elaborate hair and clambering down from the Chair. Aliyah climbs in next, Raf rolling up her jacket sleeve to slide in the needle. Another brain map. Another few minutes of scrutiny. Aliyah has some extra memory mod implants, more than Carina remembers from her Sudice brain maps. She spends extra time looking through her former colleague’s brain.

  ‘I think we’re good,’ Carina says, finally.

  ‘But you’re not totally sure?’ Raf asks.

  ‘I’m about ninety-seven per cent sure. Is the three per cent enough of an error margin for you?’

  ‘OK.’ He takes her out and leads them both to Clavell’s lavish, empty yoga studio nearby. Carina waits a few moments. Raf comes out to meet her.

  ‘You want me in there with you?’

  ‘No, you go enjoy the party. Go see Kivon. It’ll be easier to speak to them if it’s just us. Old camaraderie, you know.’

  She doesn’t need to tell him twice. ‘All right, but we’re all a ping away if you need us. And come for a dance after. Let off some steam.’ He mimes a boogie.

  Carina manages to swallow a scoff. ‘I’ll think about it. Thanks, Raf.’

  He flashes her a smile with his disguised face and heads down the corridor.

  She enters the studio. It’s long and thin, curled around the edge of the house, looking directly into the clouds and the stars. Kim and Aliyah sit on plush, soft chairs by the windows. Kim’s dress is black with white jewels clustered at the hem, like stars. Aliyah’s wearing a woman’s tux in a deep blue-purple.

  ‘Who are you?’ Kim asks, blunt as ever.

  ‘It’s me.’

  Kim startles. ‘Damn. I don’t recognize you at all.’

  Aliyah whistles. ‘Neither do I. You’re completely transformed.’

  ‘Not sure if that’s good or bad. I do have this.’ Carina takes off the mask.

  Aliyah blinks. ‘Yeah, I still don’t recognize you.’

  ‘You should have seen her a few weeks ago, Ali,’ Kim says. ‘One step away from death’s door.’

  ‘Um. Thanks,’ Carina says, awkwardly.

  They remove their masks. Seeing their true faces is easier, though Carina’s shoulder muscles are still wound tight.

  It’s been eight months since Carina has seen them in person. Aliyah has swapped her vermilion hair for turquoise, but otherwise is unchanged. Kim still looks the same as when they video-chatted, except her face is dotted with false jewels around her eyes and her hair is in a complicated updo.

  ‘So,’ Kim says. ‘I can guess why you want me here, which is why I brought Aliyah.’

  ‘Can you?’ Carina asks, gazing out the window at the stars, impossibly bright this far up above the cloud line.

  ‘You’re planning to break into Sudice,’ Aliyah starts. Carina turns back.

  ‘What makes you say that?’ she says, choosing her words carefully. She desperately wants to trust Kim, but she also knows that Sudice have deep pockets, and Kim still works there. She has become a very rich woman thanks to them. Is she a friend or an employee first?

  ‘Because it makes sense. You’ve found lots of dirt on Sudice, I’m guessing, right?’

  Carina pauses, then nods cautiously.

  ‘Good. I hope you found some really foul stuff. What were you checking for, in the Chair just now?’

  ‘Sudice have evolved brain recording enough to create sleeper agents. They turned one of our own.’

  Both Kim and Aliyah’s eyes widen. ‘Shitting hell,’ Aliyah says. ‘They actually cracked it?’

  ‘Not completely. The person they tampered with had the usual side effects. They obviously didn’t care if they killed him.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Aliyah says. ‘And you thought they might have done it to us? How?’

  ‘If you’d been put under at a hospital. Maybe even a Zeal lounge. They’re even more ruthless than we thought.’

  The silence grows between them.

  ‘I was never able to thank you all, properly,’ Carina says. ‘For helping me escape.’ They had helped her disappear from Sudice, leaving no trail that Roz could follow. They’d stuck their necks out for her, and she in turn had abandoned them to deal with Sudice on their own. They’d both pinged her and she’d ignored their calls, too ashamed by how far and how quickly she was falling into her Zeal addiction.

  Until Mark had sent her the message she couldn’t ignore.

  Kim waves her hand dismissively.

  ‘It was nothing,’ Aliyah says.

  ‘It was more than that.’ Carina coughs.

  ‘Anyway, enough with the emotional heart-to-heart, though Lovelace knows I love you both dearly,’ Kim says. ‘You need help with the three-step verification to get into Sudice, don’t you?’

  Time to delve into some specifics, but not too many. Just in case. ‘We have some passcodes,’ Carina says, delicately.

  ‘But you don’t have an employee VeriChip, and it’s not as easy as you thought to create one,’ Kim says.

  As ever, she catches on fast. ‘Not really, no. We could probably do it, but it’d take longer than we’d like. The code is complex.’

  Aliyah reaches into her tux pocket and brings out a VeriChip. She drops it into Carina’s palm.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘I’ve transferred to Sudice in Boston, and I managed to create a backup of my employee profile in San Francisco. This is a clone. If I showed up with that in my wrist tomorrow at the front doors, it’d let me in, not even pinging that I’m an out-of-Pacifica employee. No alarms.’

  ‘Why’d you do that?’

  ‘I had some vague notion of doing what you’re trying to do,’ Aliyah says. ‘Then I never moved forward with it. Too afraid of them in the end, I guess, and I never found anything really good.’

  ‘Well, I’m pretty certain we’re on a path to getting ourselves killed.’ Carina inspects the VeriChip. She’ll have Raf doub
le-check it, but this could be exactly what they need. Carina had been hoping they could borrow Kim’s or something, but this is much better. Roz will have flagged Kim’s employee file, but she might not think to look for someone who’s moved across the continent.

  ‘It’s one step of three,’ Carina says, then pauses delicately.

  ‘Yes. The other two steps are not as straight forward,’ Aliyah says. She holds herself straight and stiff.

  ‘We . . . we have a flesh doctor. Who could do what we need. It’s entirely up to you. I know it’s a big ask.’ Carina stares at Aliyah. She hopes she doesn’t look hungry, and is blinking frequently enough.

  Aliyah licks her lips, nervous. ‘You’ll destroy it after, of course? Turn it all back?’

  ‘Immediately.’

  She gives a twitchy smile. ‘OK, then. Yeah. I’ll do it.’

  Carina sags a little in relief, her skirts rustling. ‘Thank you, Aliyah.’

  ‘Can you do it here?’ Aliyah asks, looking at their ornate surroundings.

  ‘Yes. One of the other members of the Trust will come in a moment.’ Carina forces herself to reach out and squeeze both their hands. Don’t think about the tendons and bones beneath the skin. Don’t think about how easy it would be to break those fingers, one by one.

  She pings Dax, and he leaves the party to come to them. They all put their masks back on. Letting Dax in, she introduces him. He nods at them. He has prepared a room in case Aliyah agrees.

  Carina comes along, partly because she’s a familiar face – well, so to speak – and might make Aliyah more comfortable, and partly because she’s curious. Her face has been changed by a flesh doctor, but she’s never seen it done.

  Dax doesn’t let her stay.

  ‘You don’t need to see me with a scalpel,’ he says.

  Carina’s mouth twists, but she has to admit he’s right. Her urges are still there, as strong as ever. This kind of plastic surgery won’t require much blood, but still more than she’d be able to handle. Kim stays instead to watch over Aliyah.

  Carina waits in the yoga studio, staring out at the stars, arms wrapped around her torso. She feels left out. Aliyah and Kim are actual friends, who keep in touch, meet up for lunch or drinks whenever they’re near each other. Carina has never been able to do that. Probably never could. Sit and pick at food, make small talk. It’s her idea of torture. For a moment, though, she wishes.

  Mentally, she toys with the patches in the code that could help regulate her urges. It would be almost frightening to let them go. What if she ended up going back to how she was before? Does she still want to be that cold, emotionless automaton? That total distance kept her removed from people, but it also kept people safe.

  Shit. She can feel it building in her mind. The memory rising, ready to open and reveal its hidden secrets. The last image. Of course it’s tied to the memory she both pushes away as far as she can, yet picks up in her darkest moments, twisting it and turning it from different angles. She’s thought about it a few times since Mark put so much information into her head, but it wasn’t ready to release, not yet. Here it is, inevitable, almost welcome.

  Carina had the beating of her life when she arrived home late after following her father into the warehouse.

  He hit her where it never showed. Ribs, stomach, back, legs. The bruises bloomed, and later in the night she rubbed bruising cream on them to help them fade. This was unlike any of his violence before.

  She wished he’d hit her in the face. Just one shiner, right to the cheekbone. She wouldn’t use the bruising cream, and the teachers would ask questions. He was too careful.

  She wished she was strong enough to hit him back.

  Carina’s understanding of him had changed. She knew why he kept to his exact schedules, guarded his privacy under lock and key. Why he isolated her, just as he had isolated her mother. She knew so many of his secrets, but not what to do with them. Not yet.

  Her father was a killer.

  Carina’s mother had not been his first victim. He worked his way up to her. Carina hadn’t been able to find much information on his suspected victims. He had hidden his tracks very well. Probably women, or mostly women. Carina brainloaded as much information on serial killers as she could find. She couldn’t do it at school – they monitored the information you requested outside the normal curriculum – so she researched how to hide her trail and did it at home, hoping her father wouldn’t look too closely. He’d never expressed much interest in what she downloaded before, but if he had even the slightest suspicion of what she was really up to, he’d go through it with a fine-toothed comb. The information about killers did not frighten her. Perhaps it would have, if she could feel.

  Weeks stretched past. Her father became less abusive after a kill, Carina decided, her horrible beating the other night an aberration. One week out of the month, he grew disinterested in hitting her. He didn’t become pleasant by any means, but he became distant and easier to be around. She tried to think back to his patterns of abuse over the last year or so. She couldn’t pinpoint a pattern then. Maybe once every six months or so? After her mother disappeared, though, it had been about once a month. The last month, twice. He was growing worse. And her indecision meant others were dying.

  Pacifica prided itself on a lack of crime, but her father was getting away with murder right under their very noses. Countless times, she debated pinging the police. Yet she had no proof. He kept the warehouse deliberately pure. She didn’t even have a record of him hitting her. She needed to be careful. If she so much as brought up 911, he would know, and he would start monitoring more closely.

  One night, her father did hit her in the face. She stared at the mirror for a long time that night, looking at the swollen left eye, already purpling. She wasn’t sure whether her cheekbone was fractured or not. Stars of pain pulsed across her face every time she moved. Her lip was split and puffy. She couldn’t straighten her right arm all the way. That girl in the mirror looked weak. This was not going to get better or go away. Numbness would not protect her.

  ‘I’m not a victim,’ she said to the mirror. ‘Not any more.’

  She documented those injuries, storing the images deep within her implants. She smeared on the healing cream, and over the next few hours, the bruises faded from her skin. Gone but not forgotten.

  Carina had a few possible courses of action. She could upload the photos and call the police while at school. Maybe it’d be enough proof that he merited a closer look. None of his victims were likely logged as official missing persons. He probably found those who had slipped through the cracks – Zealots or the like. No one had noticed them missing, at least not yet.

  She had no idea who exactly he had hurt. Too many. She didn’t care about the people he’d killed, not really; they were too abstract. But she wished she did. Didn’t that count for something?

  Slowly, she pieced together her plan. Thought out every aspect, imagining the various ways it could fail and finding ways to fix the flaws. When it seemed as foolproof as it could be, it was time.

  She drugged her father during dinner and helped him to bed before he passed out completely. She even tucked him in. He groaned and fell back on the pillow, his mouth opening. A dribble of drool fell from his chin. She stared at him for a time. This man who had killed her mother and terrorized her throughout her life seemed so pathetic and small. Just a sad, middle-aged man who had never had a lick of waxworking done to his features.

  Carina could leave. Pack her bags, break into the safe and take the credits he stored there for an emergency. It would be enough to help her go far from Greenview House.

  She was tempted. If it wasn’t for what she’d found in that warehouse, maybe she would have.

  When he woke up, she was going to terrorize him until he pinged the police and confessed, there and then. Details of every kill. If he kept souvenirs of each death, like many serial killers did, where they were. He’d be frozen in stasis for the rest of his natural life, and she’d f
inally be free of him.

  There was always the fear that he wouldn’t play nice. That no matter what she did, he’d find a way to wriggle out of justice. She could only hope she’d planned this well enough that he couldn’t escape.

  At that time, Carina was still a minor. No matter what happened, the media were obliged to leave her name out of the papers. They’d spit out the details for greedy readers, but she wouldn’t be mentioned. She could legally change her surname in a few months and sever the last link between herself and her father. The chance of freedom.

  She disabled the house’s security, so he wouldn’t be able to ping for help once he regained consciousness. She would record his confession and ping it to the police herself. She cut the power. It was just him and her now.

  She took a slow walk through Greenview House. With any luck, this would be her last night here. The corridors were silent. This house was full of so many secrets, she could choke on them.

  Finally she went up to her father’s room. Her pocket held a knife – something to scare him into finally telling her the truth.

  There was her father. Still sleeping. Still unaware that the last chapter of his life had closed and a new one leading to stasis was about to begin.

  She sat at his bedside, crouched on the stool, waiting for the drug to wear off. Two hours she stayed there, unmoving, almost in a trance.

  Her father eventually groaned, moving his head from side to side. The sedative should still make him sluggish and weak. She tied him up anyway, with padded shackles she’d later destroy. They shouldn’t leave ligature marks. It took him a few moments to realize where he was. Another moment to take in his daughter, now crouched on the end of his bed like a spider, holding a very large knife.

  ‘Carina,’ he said, his voice thick with the drugs.

  ‘Father.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ He tried to stay calm, but even beneath his fog, the anger was bubbling, ready to break. His breath came faster, his hands clenched into fists.